Marketo’s Take on Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget Acquisition

Today, Salesforce.com announced plans to buy email company ExactTarget.

Many of our customers, prospective customers and business partners may be wondering what this move means for Marketo, since we are a leader in the marketing software space and so many salesforce.com customers also choose Marketo as their marketing automation platform.

Where marketing is going. We believe that marketing is undergoing a deep transformation driven by large-scale trends such as the rise of self-directed consumers and broad and instant availability of information online. This means marketers must fundamentally change how they engage with prospects and customers. And this in turn requires a new kind of technology solution – one that helps them to create relationship-building dialogs across fragmented channels, one that helps them think holistically about the entire range of responsibilities of the modern marketing professional, and one that is powered by deep insight and analytics. Our comprehensive solution includes great email capabilities, but goes much deeper to include enterprise-class marketing automation, social marketing, marketing financial management, and revenue cycle analytics. Frankly, we think equating email marketing with a modern and complete marketing platform is a misunderstanding of where the market is going. We founded Marketo with an unwavering vision about where marketing was headed, and have been the innovator in the space ever since.

Best-of-breed marketing solution. Furthermore, one of the things we believe most fundamentally is that marketing professionals want to buy the best and most innovative marketing solution available. That’s why we built a marketing solution for marketers, by marketers. This is and will continue to be our sole mission at Marketo. We think this best of breed perspective is more important than ever, as cloud computing now allows every department in the enterprise to buy the best product for their needs. This was a winning recipe for Benioff – in the sales force automation market – as it is for Workday, NetSuite, Cornerstone On-Demand, Box.com, and numerous other best-of-breed cloud applications. This is the future, and it’s why we are proud to be the leading independent marketing software company today working with ALL leading CRM solutions, including salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, Netsuite, and SugarCRM.

Independently rated the leader. As recently as this year, salesforce.com’s own customers have rated Marketo as the best marketing solution, continuing a five-year streak of similar affirmation from the salesforce.com customer base. We see no reason that today’s news should change our leadership position among salesforce.com customers or in the marketplace at large, as our marketing platform has been repeatedly validated as one of the best: Gartner’s Magic Quadrant recently positioned us as a leader and named us as the most visionary company in the CRM Lead Management space. Similarly, SiriusDecisions ranked Marketo as a top Marketing Automation platform, citing our leadership in user experience, functionality and enablement. We’re proud of this independent validation, but we’re even more proud of the success that our 2300+ SMB and enterprise customers have been able to achieve with Marketo.

Customer support. For our joint customers with salesforce.com,we don’t expect this move to result in any disruption to our ability to integrate with your existing solutions. More broadly, for all our customers and partners, I want to assure everyone that we have the resources and vision to continue to be the marketing thought leader and innovator, not just for salesforce.com customers, but for all marketing professionals.

We are as excited as ever for the future, and look forward to continuing to provide you our customers, and the marketplace at large, with thought leadership, innovative technology and comprehensive solutions to foster your marketing success.

Update: See the comments for additional commentary.

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